


The Way You Said "I Love You."

by Bakuras



Category: Dangan Ronpa, Dangan Ronpa Zero
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-12-04
Updated: 2015-12-05
Packaged: 2018-05-04 21:51:20
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 2
Words: 1,853
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5349770
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Bakuras/pseuds/Bakuras
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A collection of meme prompts from Tumblr, about saying the words "I love you."</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Muffled, through a door.

The idea of giving up doesn’t cross your mind, even after you feel your collarbone snap on the seventh contact.

By the ninth, the twelfth, the seventeenth, you know that it’s probably jutting out of your skin.  If you don’t stop, you might drive the jagged piece through the artery where your jaw meets your neck and bleed yourself out.  If you don’t, you’ll keep going. You’ll snap your neck, surely, on one of these collisions, or fracture every bone in your shoulders, in your spine, in everything that’s slamming against what you  _presume_  is the weakest part of the door.  You’ll disintegrate your bones from the outside in, grinding them to dust as they continue to break, to pierce your skin, and to be sanded down by collision on collision on collision on collision - 

You might have left to find something bigger to throw against it if you felt you had the time.  Hell, it may have even  _saved_  you time that you’re currently wasting, breaking your body against a thick layer of metal that won’t so much as  _shift_  under all of your weight coming at it over and over.  The door isn’t giving.  Your body will be in splinters by the time you so much as dent the deadbolt.  You  _know_  it’s inefficient, you  _know_  it’s never going to work, but you can’t bring yourself to look for another option.

There’s a sliver of an opening at the very bottom.  It’s why you’re  _terrified_  to leave them.

You…you can hear their voices.  

You can hear  _his_  voice.

And all of the  _crunching_ , the  _gushing_ , the cracking around it.  

 _I-I’m s-s-s-sorr…r - y._ You hear him sob.  He’s crying so hard that he can barely hitch his breath into that pathetic, forceful  _squeal_  that you hear next.  

_I-I- I- I - ‘ mmm S-s-s…._

_**Crunch**.  _

_S-s or…I’ m s-s_

_**Squelch**.  _

_Sorr….y, I’m sorry I’m sorry I-I-I-I-I-I-I’mmmmmmmm - sorryimsorryimsorryimsorryimsorryimsorryimsorryimsorryimsorryims-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s- …._

_**Snap**._

You only register that your legs have given out beneath you when you feel your nails dig into them.  You could be drawing blood underneath your jeans.  You don’t know.  You really don’t care.  

… And then suddenly you’re caught between accepting one of two equally true, and equally incapacitating realities.  It has to be one or the other.  If you accept  _both_ , you may never move again.  

You either accept the fact that your body is far too broken to help anyone, that this door is never going to crack, that the students inside are completely and entirely at the mercy of both one another  _and_  Enoshima’s ability to keep her word - 

Or you accept that with every  _squelch_ , with every  _crunch_ , with every unmistakable  _clang_ of metal hitting fragile, hollow bone…

~~Every _splash_  of human flesh hitting against the walls like common ground meat…~~

…

…It’s relief.  You’re feeling  _relief_.

You swore to protect them, and yet with every terrifying, painful, inhuman death - 

…

Aha. Ha. 

H h a a.  AH a _.  H a._

Your chest hurts.  You think for a moment that the difficulty breathing has to do with a likely punctured lung.  It doesn’t.  

It’s that you’re sobbing so hard that you can’t draw breath.  

Your teeth are clenched together so tightly that your jaw aches.  Your eyes are screwed shut, and you can’t rip them open, force your sight to come back and drown out the senses that  _do_  know what is going on in that room.  Drown out the sound.  The smell.  

The  _taste_.

The air is thick enough to leave a layer of heat and blood and  _bodies_  on your tongue, and you want to vomit.  You would, if your body trusted you not to choke on it with as hard as you’re already racking.  

And even then.  

All you know, all you can think of,  – 

..

..

_I love you._

_…_

_…_

_……._

It’s the first time you say it, and it’s hissed into existence like a prayer, through locked jaw and spasming throat.  

_I love you._

_…_

It almost  _is_  a prayer.  The universe has shifted for less.  If you pray, if you grovel, if you  _beg_  hard enough, with enough conviction, enough sincerity, if you - 

… 

I-I — I…. 

I love you. 

_IloveyouIloveyouIloveyouIloveyouIloveyouIloveyouIloveyouIloveyouIloveyouIloveyouIloveyouIloveyouIloveyouIloveyouIloveyouIloveyouIloveyouIloveyouIloveyouIloveyouIloveyouIloveyouIloveyouIloveyouIloveyouIloveyouIloveyouIloveyouIloveyouIloveyouIloveyouIloveyouIloveyouIloveyouIloveyouIloveyou_

You say it until you’re screaming it.  

You say it until your voice is hoarse and sore and saying it again feels like swallowing broken shards of concrete.  

….

You say it until Izuru Kamukura is announced the victor, and the door finally gives.  

…

When Enoshima cuts your throat, you drive yourself into her knife.


	2. With a Shuddering Gasp.

You don’t remember the last morning that you woke up in anything other than a cold panic. 

You’ve known, cognitively at least, that he’s there, that he’s safe, that the very last flickering ember of war has been extinguished for almost five years.  The earth reverted to what it was before that chaos.  Peace is a distant, glossy memory to you both by now, like an old film reel that had been dripped on by distilled turpentine, but that alone doesn’t render it unrecognizable.  The wreckage is still there, of course, it takes more than a few years to erase the footprints of armageddon.  But people walk the streets freely now, unafraid.  

None of this stops you from envisioning the horrific things that could be done to his body, that almost  _were_  done to his body.  And for a split second you wonder, every morning, if this moment is the most terrified you’ve ever been, as your eyes wretch open and you gasp for a shaky breath.  It’s the same, it’s _always_  the same.   He isn’t cut open at the stomach, or being actively skinned alive,  _begging_  you to drive a stake into his heart and put an end to that unimaginable amount of pain.  He’s sleeping beside you, or maybe you woke him up again.  But he’s okay.

He knows, too.  He’s told you that you scream in your sleep sometimes.  Occasionally about your brothers, but mostly about him.  It isn’t anything foreign to him, though.  He’s been screaming in his sleep since the night that you and your broken body  _somehow_  carried him out of the school. 

You always hold him when he wakes up.  Sometimes you talk to him until he falls back asleep, telling him decade-old stories about you and your brothers that he’s heard a hundred times before.  Sometimes you softly hum the melody of a song that you know his mother used to sing to him as a child when he was sick.  You know your voice isn’t particularly soft, or melodic, and your pitch is never quite right, but it soothes him enough to send him back to sleep, even if it’s for only another half an hour before he’s plagued with shakes and nightmares again.  

And then sometimes, if the nightmare was about you, and only if he asks it of you and you  _know_  he means it, you make love to him then and there.  

Making love in the middle of the night like that is  _much_  different than any other time of day, be it by the formality of candlelight or the quiet playfulness of midmorning.  There are nights when you can go for hours and hours, orgasms upon orgasms, and there are days when you lift him onto the counter or against the back wall and just  _fuck_  him until he can’t breathe.  It’s not always soft, but it’s always tender, it’s always loving.  (Between the two of you and all you’ve seen, all you’ve been through, there’s no way it could be anything  _but.)_  Even so, no small amount of tenderness can come  _close_  to those moments after he believed he lost you for good, when he needs  _desperately_  to be held, to be touched, to be reassured that you’re there, you’re  _ **there**_ , and you’re staying.

This time he dreamt that you were taken apart, piece by piece, fed some tar-black drug through a needle to keep you awake through the whole ordeal.  When he told you, he half screamed it, and even as you move inside of him now, you can feel his fingertips search your skin for scissures.  

If you thought he was crying from pain, you would stop.  But his legs wrap around your hips to pull you as deep as you can go, to take you to the hilt, body arching up to meet yours halfway.  He wants to touch as much of you as possible, as though the parts of you that he saw shredded apart with a bonesaw could be plastered back together in your sweat and your trembles.  

It’s almost overwhelming how much smaller his hands are than yours.  You could easily snap his bones if you wanted to, and that’s part of why you barely press on them at all, even as you slide your palm from his forearm to his wrist, and then as you slip your fingers in the crevices between his.  Your other arm rests beneath you, supporting the weight of the two of you on your elbows, as you hold him tight against your chest by the small of his back. 

He pulls you deeper still, the air of the bedroom silent and still besides hot, labored panting and the shifting of sheets beneath and above your bodies.  It’s a bit warm in the room for you, especially to be making love, but years ago he told you offhandedly that cold weather makes his muscles ache.

Even as the room grows louder, grows hotter, and you can feel the inner part of his thighs shudder around the space between your hips and your waistline, you can tell that his goal isn’t orgasm.  He intends to do this until you run out of moonlight, or until you collapse, or both.  To touch you everywhere he can reach, to have you touch  _him_  everywhere that  _you_  can reach.

His face and yours are mere millimeters apart now, and your lips graze one another every three or so thrusts.  And then there’s a moment, where his hand twitches underneath your own - his breathing turns to soft whines, you feel him tighten around you.  You know he doesn’t want it to be over, and you slow.  

The hand that was intertwined with his travels the length of his arm, of his body, to meet the other one underneath him.  It’s only when you hold him like this, so close, so completely, that you understand how  _small_ , how  _fragile_  - 

…There’s sobs coming from between his teeth.  You feel a sharp digging of pain along your spine, but you allow him to burrow his nails into your skin without complaint.  He’s anchoring you, holding your body here on earth with him as he fights with his own fear that you will vanish into thin air if he so much as loosened his grip.  You know.  You’ve had those nights.  

As much as you hate yourself for it, he has nicks and scars along his backbone for that very reason.

The “I love you” is whispered in a shudder, half-breaking over the sob still caught in his throat.  

The “I love you too” is whispered the exact same way.


End file.
